It's Only a Movie

by Charlotte Chandler

  UNDERCAPRICORNWAS TO BE the first Transatlantic Pictures production, but its star, Ingrid Bergman, was unavailable. While Hitchcock and Bernstein waited, they chose to make what seemed to be a simple one-set picture. Patrick Hamilton’s 1929 one-set play, Rope’s End, seemed an ideal vehicle to test Hitchcock’s experimental ideas. Instead of shooting in conventional camera setups, he would shoot the entire play straight through, interrupted only by the need to change the nine-and-a-half-minute film reels. He envisioned a continuous filmed drama that is shown exactly as it happens in eighty minutes.

  To achieve this feat, a special set had to be built, with everything, including the walls, silently mobile so that the six-thousand-pound motorized dolly with its massive motorized Technicolor camera could move anywhere at any time.

  “Our roving Technicolor camera had to poke its lens into every nook and cranny of the collapsible Sutton Place apartment of the killers,” Hitchcock told me. “Prop men were crouching everywhere, set to pounce on furniture and pull it out of the way of the camera, and then replace it after it had passed. Everyone was signaling everyone else to move something that had to be moved. Even the actors were moving chairs, or catching people who had to fall out of the way of the camera. Then, if someone fluffed a line, even in the last few seconds of the nine-minute take, we had to shoot it again, from three to six times. This was especially trying for Mr. [Dick] Hogan, whose performance after being garroted consisted of lying in the dark of an antique chest for almost ten minutes, listening to the mayhem.”

  This “mayhem,” the rolling of walls on Vaseline-lubricated rollers, the scraping of furniture being shuffled back and forth, the rustling of actors trying to avoid getting in the picture or being run over by the camera, the breathing of prop men, all of this was caught along with the dialogue by the four microphones placed above the set at various locations. It became evident that some post-synchronization of sound would be necessary.

  Since the action of the play takes place during the early hours of an evening, the view of New York City from the Sutton Place apartment must change, from daylight, to twilight, to night. To achieve this effect, a complicated cyclorama was built, showing a thirty-five-mile panorama of the city. Model buildings were built to scale in front of the cyclorama to give the effect of depth. This was lit by thousands of incandescent bulbs of various sizes, and numerous neon signs controlled by a complex lighting console.

  This was Hitchcock’s first color film, and he had definite ideas about what colors he wanted. “The set and the costumes had been carefully muted down,” Laurents recalled, “and the first prints that came out, it was like fiesta time in Mexico. Hitchcock was furious, and it took a long time before it suited him.”

  All of the action takes place in the living room of the fashionable apartment.

  Two college friends (John Dall and Farley Granger) strangle a third friend for the intellectual thrill of committing the perfect crime, and then serve hors d’oeuvres and drinks to the victim’s relatives and friends on the antique chest containing his body. After the party, their crime is discovered by the professor (James Stewart) whose teachings were misinterpreted as justification for the murder.

  Farley Granger described some of his Rope experiences: “The studio had been yelling for me to get back from New York. It was to do Rope. Of course, as soon as I knew it was a Hitchcock film, I could have flown back without a plane.

  “Those tricky long takes caused so many problems. The camera, for instance, was an enormous monster. As the camera moved, they would break away the walls and there’d be people moving the lights at the same time to keep you in the light. Then, for instance, you have to sit down just out of camera range, and there was always a stage-hand there with a seat to slip under you at just the last minute. I saved Constance Collier once because I saw she was ready to sit down and there was no chair.

  “She and Sir Cedric Hardwicke were the jolliest of the group. All the young people were taking it very seriously, and they were having a ball.

  “Hitch would say, ‘What next?’ And he’d go over and look at the book. Then, he’d say, ‘Oh, yes, okay.’

  “Hitch was very definite in what he wanted, you know, because it had all been planned and done with the drawings, so he had to be sure that everything was right. In this film, he had to be more certain of everything because of the way he was shooting it.

  “The crews were crazy about him. They respected his knowledge of everything. He really understood lenses, and he was jolly with them.”

  Hume Cronyn told me, “When Hitch asked me if I would like to work on Patrick Hamilton’s play Rope for the screen, well, I was very complimented, to say the least. But why would he choose a relatively inexperienced writer like me when he could get anyone he wanted?

  “He had two reasons. First of all, we got along smashingly. He may have felt more at ease with Canadians than with Americans. I think Hitch liked people intuitively, the way a child does. When he liked you, he really liked you.

  “Second, since he planned to do Rope exactly as it appeared on the stage, with no editing and in reel-long takes, he wanted someone who had a lot of stage experience as well as film knowledge. Then, he brought in Arthur Laurents, but Hitch and I got along well enough for him to ask me to do the same for his next film, Under Capricorn.”

  Arthur Laurents wondered about the Cronyn connection. “When I saw Hume Cronyn’s name next to mine for the writing credit, I was, to put it mildly, astonished. I had never been given one word of his ‘adaptation,’ nor did I even know he was writing one. I was always under the impression that we were doing the play pretty much as it was onstage, and that I was supposed to ‘Americanize’ and bring it up to date.”

  Gary Stevens, the publicist for Rope, described his first meeting with Hitchcock. Hitchcock played a practical joke I recognized from my own experiences with him.

  “It was in a sixteenth-floor suite at the St. Regis Hotel in New York,” Stevens said. “We got into the elevator, and on the fifteenth floor, two elderly ladies got on. As the elevator went down, he said to me, out of nowhere, ‘Gary, did you clean the blood off the knife?’ I looked at him, but I didn’t say anything. The two women stared at us, and when the elevator stopped at the eleventh floor, they were so frightened, they rushed out, not waiting to go down to the lobby. That was how my first meeting with him went.

  “I took him to a very popular morning program. They started to talk about his picture, and he went into his own monologue. It was breakfast time, and Hitchcock went into a tirade about eggs. He said, ‘Oh, what a horrible dirty thing an egg is. You open it up and it’s slimy and runs out.’ People all over the city must have had their breakfasts ruined, and it was a hell of a time before they got him out of it. By that time, he knew I was on to him, and he gave me a sly wink.”

  “When I worked on Rope,” Arthur Laurents told me, “I was included as a member of Hitchcock’s extended family, and it was a laughing and loving family. I was invited frequently to have a family dinner at their home in upper-strata Bel Air or at the country house in northern California. I was a regular at Alfred Hitchcock’s table at Romanoff’s. Romanoff’s was the Hollywood restaurant. He always ordered steak with some potatoes, wine, and some black coffee. I understood that eating there with Hitchcock at his table was special, and that eating there without him would never quite be the same. I was soon to find out.

  “After the completion of Rope, I was invited to one of those family dinners at the Hitchcocks, and Sidney Bernstein was there. After dinner, I was given a novel to take home and read, Under Capricorn. I knew what it meant. I was quite flattered. It meant he really liked what I did. And I was prepared to like Under Capricorn—better than like it.

  “I was lightly admonished, as if I needed to be, not to waste any time in getting it read, and then, as if I needed any extra incentive, I was told, ‘Ingrid will be doing it.’

  “As soon as I got home, I began reading. I thought I would try to get through it t
hat night. I didn’t make it. The next day, I was still limping along.

  “What Hitchcock and Ingrid saw in Under Capricorn was a mystery to me. I felt it was wrong for all of us.

  “Hitch and I were friends, but I was hesitant about saying, ‘Why did you buy this?’ Instead I simply said I would very much like to work for him again, but I was the wrong writer for Under Capricorn. It just wasn’t my cup of tea.

  “He changed the subject. I realized I had been excommunicated.

  “Later, Sidney [Bernstein] tried to get me to recant. I had hurt Hitch with my ‘disloyalty,’ loyalty for him being an unquestioning ‘yes,’ disloyalty, a ‘no.’ But if I said ‘yes,’ it would make me really disloyal. I never again sat at his table at Romanoff’s.”

  HITCHCOCK HAD RECEIVED an unpublished treatment of Helen Simpson’s 1937 novel from Selznick’s office in 1944. He saw enough promise in the story to buy the screen rights for a token price, and then he put it aside for later consideration. He and Sidney Bernstein were already making plans for their Transatlantic Pictures venture, and they would need properties to develop. It appealed to Ingrid Bergman, who agreed to make the picture for Transatlantic, and who encouraged Hitchcock to make the film. Before James Bridie was brought in to write the screenplay, Hume Cronyn worked on a treatment, to which Alma made contributions.

  “I did Under Capricorn because Ingrid liked it,” Hitchcock told me. “From that, I learned that it was better to look at Ingrid than to listen to her.”

  Charles Adare (Michael Wilding) arrives in Australia in 1831 with his uncle, the new governor (Cecil Parker). Unsuccessful in Ireland, Charles hopes to make his fortune in Sydney.

  He is befriended by Samson Flusky (Joseph Cotten), a prosperous ex-convict. Sam’s wife, Lady Henrietta, “Hattie” (Ingrid Bergman), was a friend of Charles’s sister in Ireland. Sam hopes that the young man will be able to cheer up his wife, who is a mentally unstable alcoholic. Meanwhile the attractive housekeeper, Milly (Margaret Leighton), secretly loves Sam, and encourages Hattie’s drinking.

  Sam had been sent to an Australian prison after he confessed to a killing that Hattie actually committed. She had followed him and waited for his release.

  Charles’s efforts to rehabilitate Hattie conflict with Milly’s intentions. Eventually, Sam becomes jealous, and in a rage, accidentally shoots Charles. This time, Hattie accepts the blame for the shooting.

  Milly, seeing her chances to win Sam slipping away, attempts to poison Hattie, who is saved in time. When Charles recovers, he tells the authorities that the shooting was accidental.

  Hattie stays with Sam, whom she really loves, and Charles leaves for Ireland because he sees no future for himself in Australia.

  Jack Cardiff, the film’s cinematographer, described for me what he called “the daunting challenge” of shooting Under Capricorn.

  “They built a huge composite set of the entire mansion. It filled the largest stage at Elstree’s M-G-M Studios. I wondered how on earth I could possibly light so many sets at once! Since the camera was going to have to track on a crane noiselessly all over the place, I worked more closely with the director than usual.

  “Each long take had to be covered in one shot with one camera. For example: Michael Wilding enters through the front door of the mansion, into a large circular hall with a winding stairway. He turns to his right and walks along a narrow corridor into the servants’ quarters. After saying something, he returns to the hall, along another passage into a large drawing room. More dialogue and more camera movement, and then the camera follows him back to the hall. Now he goes up the stairs and walks down a hallway to a door. He opens the door and enters a bedroom, approaching a large bed where Ingrid Bergman is sleeping. As he and the camera near her, the bed itself tilts towards the camera to avoid the camera having to crane up for an overhead shot.

  “We rehearsed the whole day and shot the next day. I had to light all of the sets we’d be using in one go. The noise was indescribable. As the electric crane rolled through the sets, whole walls opened up, furniture was whisked out of the way by frantic prop men, and then just as frantically put back as the crane made a return trip.

  “The most incredible take was when the camera ends up in a dining room with eight people sitting at a long Georgian table. Hitch wanted a shot of the guests, looking down the table, then to track in to a close-up of Ingrid Bergman at the far end.

  “The Technicolor camera, inside its enormous blimp, was more than four feet high. To crane above the table, over the candlesticks, the wine, and the food, it would have been necessary for the camera to be very high up, looking down on the heads of the actors. The problem was solved by cutting the table into sections, and then fastening everything down very firmly—food, plates, silverware, glasses, napkins, salt shakers, everything.

  “Each actor had a section of the table. The camera is now positioned at table level instead of six feet above it. At the beginning of the scene, the guests are all sitting in their places enjoying a leisurely banquet. The camera moves forward, bearing down on each guest, but at the last moment, each of them falls back on a mattress while holding on to his section of the table with all the props stuck to it.

  “I don’t know how Ingrid kept a straight face while watching her fellow actors fall back like dominoes. It was hilarious, but it worked. I think a film of Capricorn being made would have been far more successful than Capricorn itself.”

  Cardiff recalled that Joseph Cotten hated the new technique especially the electric crane-dolly. “He was a complete professional and never complained. But he told me that he could always feel the monster sneaking up behind him and was terrified it would run him over.

  “Practically all of Hitchcock’s energies were spent on pre-production. Everything was worked out in detail, every page timed. If a page was just a few seconds off, everything would have been off. No wonder Hitch sometimes found the actual shooting of the film something of a bore.

  “During a ten-minute take, he would have his back to the set, aimlessly looking down at the floor. Then, at the end, after he had said ‘Cut,’ he would ask my camera operator, ‘How was that for you, Paul?’ If Paul nodded yes, he would accept the whole reel. He hardly ever watched the rushes of the day’s work. From the moment he had drawn pictures of the camera setups, he had the picture all firmly in his mind.

  “On his other films, using normal techniques, he used his camera in a way no one else ever had, cutting from shot to shot to obtain rhythmic emphasis. I think that’s where Under Capricorn failed. Despite Hitch’s brilliant ideas on how to keep the camera moving, he couldn’t overcome the inevitable loss of tempo. Having to shoot the whole reel without any cuts, the camera had to move cumbersomely all over the place in order to obtain the same angles the editor would have used in cutting.”

  Sound director Peter Handford told me that there was absolutely no post-synchronization at all. It was all done at the time on the set.

  “We had a very, very good editor. Without him, it would have been difficult. Most editors would have said, ‘Oh, this is ridiculous. Post-sync is just as good.’ But Hitchcock wanted it done properly on the set.

  “He was a wonderful man, Hitchcock. Years later when he did Frenzy, he sent for me. After all that time!

  “He had the largest studio in M-G-M, and the whole floor of the stage, covered in carpet. All that carpet came from Sidney Bernstein’s cinemas. Carpeting was rationed, you see, because of the war.

  “He would do a scene, and then, as soon as he’d done the take where there was a problem, he would ask me to tell him what the problem was. He would then clear the stage as soon as he had the take he considered to be best, and he’d get the actors to do the whole scene over again with all the movement, but without the camera.

  “And it worked, because they were good actors, and problems of synchronization, of course, had to be put together by the editor. There was no problem then, because their timing was exactly the same as it was when they had the camer
a. They had the timing from the rehearsals. He was very strict about timing in the rehearsals. This does work with real actors who knew exactly what was wanted.

  “It’s true. We didn’t do any post-sync at all. I want to repeat that, because it was so amazing. It was all done with the actors as if it was a proper take of the camera. That’s why it worked. If you had a man a long way from the table and another close, the sound perspective was exactly right.

  “Some big scenes were rehearsed for two or three days, mainly because of the complicated camera movement. Even with the rehearsal, things could go wrong, and sometimes did. Ingrid Bergman said it was not exactly fun, but interesting.

  “I worked with her again much later, on Murder on the Orient Express. I didn’t realize at the time she did Under Capricorn what a terrible stress she was under, because she was leaving her husband. You would never know she was under such a strain as that.

  “Hitchcock had a wonderful sense of humor, and he loved playing jokes on people. For instance, if we were doing a take, he would suddenly come up to me, and he’d lift my headphones and tell me some awful joke and try to get me to laugh.

  “He was very fond of steam trains, railway trains. And he found out it was one of my major loves, steam railways, and we would talk about that for a long time. On steam trains, the wagon behind the engine was called the tender, the one full of coal. Hitchcock came up to me once and said, ‘Do you know why the locomotive was so unhappy?’ and I said, ‘No, not at all.’

  “And he said, ‘Because it had a tender behind.’”

  HITCHCOCK WAS UNHAPPY, disappointed, when Ingrid Bergman left Hollywood to be with Italian director Roberto Rossellini. Divorcing her husband, Peter Lindstrom, she starred in several films of Rossellini, whom she married and with whom she had three children. It was quite a while before she was welcomed back in Hollywood, “forgiven” for the “scandal,” and bankable again. Bergman told me that Hitchcock had never said anything to her about “Roberto,” though she knew he wanted her to be in his movies, not Italian films.